Biolatry: A Surrender of Understanding (Response to Ingold’s ‘A Naturalist Abroad in the Museum of Ontology’)

ABSTRACT

The following is a response to Tim Ingold’s review article entitled ‘A Naturalist Abroad in the Museum of Ontology’ and the second part of a larger dialogue concerning: Beyond Nature and Culture, by Philippe Descola. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2013, xxii + 463 pp., foreword by Marshall Sahlins, preface, notes, bibliography, index, (hardback), ISBN: 978-0-226-14445-0.

See also:

A Naturalist Abroad in the Museum of Ontology: Philippe Descola’s Beyond Nature and Culture 10.1080/00664677.2015.1136591

Rejoinder to Descola’s Biolatry: A Surrender of Understanding10.1080/00664677.2016.1212532

KEYWORDS:

• Structure
• model
• life
• ontology
• naturalism
• knowledge

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Remember, among others, the ‘useless Durkheim’ (title of an essay by Tilly 1981) or the ‘technocratic totalitarianism’ of Lévi-Strauss (Diamond 1974, 297).

2. Such as when Ingold persistently confuses his definition of naturalism as cognitive realism with my ontological definition of it as a combination of physical continuity and moral discontinuity; or when he chooses to qualify my conception of interiority as an internal cognitive device when I see it as an inward disposition the existence of which can only be ascertained through its outward effects; or again when he objects that my definition of production as the imposition of a design upon matter does not tally with the practice of the craftsman, when it should be obvious that I am referring to how production is conceptualised, not to how people actually experience the fashioning of artefacts or bodies.

3. My translation; the full passage is as follows:

  il n’y a pas de vrai sens d’un texte. Pas d’autorité de l’auteur. Quoi qu’il ait voulu dire, il a écrit ce qu’il a écrit. Une fois publié, un texte est comme un appareil dont chacun se peut servir à sa guise et selon ses moyens: il n’est pas sûr que le constructeur en use mieux qu’un autre. (Valéry [1933] 1957–60, 1507)

4. Radcliffe-Brown’s method is forcefully exposed in his introduction to Structure and Function in Primitive Society (1952). Typological comparatism by no means stopped with Radcliffe-Brown. Cross-cultural surveys such as that developed within the Yale Human Relations Area Files project (see Murdock et al. [2006] or the wide-ranging classifications of institutions propounded by Alain Testart, for instance, in Testart [2005] are contemporary examples of the Radcliffe-Brownian comparative programme taken seriously.

5. My translation of ‘Ce n’est pas la comparaison qui fonde la généralisation, mais le contraire’ (Lévi-Strauss 1958, 34).

6. See my comment of the two forms of morphogenesis, Goethean and Thompsonian, in Descola (2012).

7. In the Elementary Structures of Kinship, Lévi-Strauss does invoke cognitive imperatives – the necessity of rules, the notion of reciprocity and the synthetic nature of the gift – but these are deemed to be the basis of the institutions of marriage and have nothing to do with the actual architecture of the structural models of marriage alliance (see Descola 2009).

8. I am aware that Ingold strongly disagrees with this view of ontogeny, but I will not repeat here what I have already written in response to Christina Toren who holds the same views as Ingold (see Descola 2014a).

9. And there are a number of preliminary results in a variety of domains – from the sociology of institutions to Medieval history, from the archaeology of the Andes or of the European Bronze Age to the ethnohistory of the Plain Indians, from studies in sustainable development to the philosophy of care – which show that these tools can be put to use efficiently by others than me.

10. Such as Lebensraum, see Ingold (2008, 1797). I confess I had rather write ‘conservative’ books in dialogue with two socialist thinkers like Durkheim and Mauss than live my life ‘in the open’ with Martin Heidegger.

11. As an example, see my contribution to the Anthropocene forum I organised as part of the events surrounding the COP 21 Paris conference on global warming in December 2015 (Descola 2015).